This invention relates to postage cancellation machines, and more particularly to a postage cancellation machine which cancels a postage indicium printed on a mailpiece.
Postage meters which print an indication of postage value, commonly referred to as an indicium, have been utilized throughout the twentieth century as an alternative to the use of either permit mail or postage stamps. Typically, older postage meters used a rotary drum with a printing die thereon as the means for printing the indicium. However, modern postage meters are now incorporating digital printing technology, such as ink jet printing, as a replacement for the older rotating drum/printing die technology primarily for its reduced cost and adaptability to print different images via simple software changes within the postage meter.
Digital printing technology very easily accommodates the printing of data within the indicium that can vary from mailpiece to mailpiece such as the date of printing, the postage amount, and the mailpiece count number. Because of the ability to easily print variable data utilizing digital printing techniques, both meter manufacturers and postal authorities worldwide have recognized that encrypted data which is unique to each individual mailpiece indicium can be included in the printed indicium and subsequently used to verify the authenticity of each printed indicium. That is, a unique encrypted data set can be created and printed as part of each indicium utilizing data elements contained within the indicium, such as postage amount, date of printing, and meter serial number, which data elements serve as input data to known encryption algorithms which in turn produce the unique encrypted data set. Subsequent to the printing of the indicium the postal authority can use conventional scanning equipment and associated software to scan and read the indicium using normal mailpiece pro sing to obtain the data elements and verify a unique encrypted data set based on the scanned data elements. Since the encryption algorithms utilized by the postal authority at its verification facility would be the same as those used in the meter, the encrypted data elements on the mailpiece should match that produced by the postal authority if the indicium is authentic.
Assuming that the verification is successfully completed, the indicium information for each mailpiece can be stored in a postal authority data base. Thus, if a second mailpiece having the same indicium printed thereon is subsequently verified by the postal authority and compared to the data base, it will be flagged as likely being a fraudulent (i.e copied) indicium.
The above discussed verification system generally is effective except that even if a particular indicium is designated as being authentic but already included in the verification data base there is no way of determining if the indicium is a fraudulent copy of a valid indicia or simply a valid indicia being scanned for a second time. That is, as an individual mailpiece is being processed it might be sent through various postal processing facilities. If the indicium is scanned at each facility, the same valid indicium will be identified as a redundant entry into the verification data base at each scanning facility it is processed through subsequent to its scanning at a first scanning facility. While to some degree this situation could be improved by only performing verification at selected major processing facilities, a problem would still exist for mail processed between major processing facilities relative to distinguishing at those facilities mailpieces which came from another major verification processing facility.
The use of fraudulent indicia (either a reused or a copied valid indicia) has always been considered a problem by postal authorities. In the stamp environment, this problem has partially been solved by the printing of a cancellation mark over a stamp using a conventional facer/canceler machine. The cancellation mark provides a visual indication that the postage stamp has ready been used thereby preventing its reuse. However, such cancellation marks have not historically been used to cancel postal indicium. Moreover, if a cancellation mark were to be imprinted over an indicium, it would interfere with the machine readability of the data in the indicium thereby possibly preventing verification of the encrypted data elements. Moreover, some of the verification systems proposed to date require destination information to be included as part of the indicium. This destination information is machine readable and thus can be automatically scanned and read during mailpiece processing thereby shortening mailpiece processing time. However, if a cancellation mark were printed over the indicium, it would prevent the accurate machine readability of the destination data precluding its use to expedite mailpiece processing.
The failure to cancel postage indicium however, presents a problem for many postal authorities in connection with their ability to properly evaluate their performance from a mailpiece processing timeframe viewpoint. For example, the Unites States Postal Service compares the date a destination post office receives a mailpiece to the printing date in the indicium to determine mailpiece processing time. However, if the indicium is printed on a mailpiece but not deposited with the originating post office for several days thereafter, the calculated mailpiece processing time will be longer than the actual processing time. This problem is likely to increase with the introduction of low cost meter products which are geared for the small office/home office environment (SOHO). It is anticipated that the typical user in the SOHO environment is much more likely to have a time gap between indicium printing and mailpiece deposit since they don't have a dedicated mailroom and trips to the post office generally occur on a not to interfere basis.